According to U.Today, Elon Musk, the serial tech entrepreneur behind companies such as X, Tesla, and xAI, has voiced concerns over a new AI product announced by Microsoft. Musk took to his social media platform, X (formerly known as Twitter), to warn the global community about the potential real-life implications of the 'Black Mirror' TV series. The warning was specifically about Microsoft's new feature, 'Recall', which Musk had previously sued.
'Recall' is a new addition to the Windows operating system that constantly takes screenshots of users' computers, allowing them to remember and quickly access everything they had on their computers later, like an archive. Musk highlighted that this feature resembles an episode from the TV series 'Black Mirror', which presents possible dystopian scenarios of how future technologies could be used to control and rule the global population. Musk stated that he would definitely turn this Microsoft feature off.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described 'Recall' as a way to introduce photographic memories into users' history. Users will be able to perform a semantic search if they want to recall what they did on their PCs at a certain previous point, on a certain day, in a particular month, year, etc., to 'recreate moments from the past.' All this data will then be processed by AI to make it searchable.
However, Musk suggested that this data, including screenshots, could be easily accessed and used to control users' actions and to see exactly what web pages they visited, potentially infringing on their personal files, photos, correspondence, and more. In the context of strengthening authoritarian regimes worldwide, this could become a perfect tool for controlling the population through constant surveillance of their PCs. Nadella assures that this will only be done locally on users' PCs, and that those who believe this feature could be dangerous and privacy-interfering have nothing to worry about.
